Thread by @ProfPaulPoast

1/A number of people expressed interest in hearing more about my new grad course, "Inference in Diplomatic History and International Relations".

So I wrote this thread to help describe the course and its goal.

2/First and foremost, here is the link the syllabus:

dropbox.com/s/12d7g1v4bxcv…

3/The course is the first in a two course sequence I've created for @UChicagoPoliSci & @UChicagoCIR titled "Evidence and Analysis in International Relations Research".

4/For those curious, the second course is "Quantitative Security", which I teach in the winter. I've taught that course the past two years. My recent #IR_True_NonTrivial threads on war data draw on that course.

Here is the syllabus:

dropbox.com/s/xr5fnw90abap…

5/The word "inference" in the course title is deliberate. At its heart, this is a course about the question "how do we know the cause of an event?"

This is a core question in social science and this course uses diplomatic history as a vehicle for thinking about that question.

6/For that reason, the course begins by reading about interpretative methods, the fundamental problem of causal inference, and Judea Pearl graphs

7/Next, we discuss the source of our data -- the archives and primary source material.

This gives me a chance to "show and tell" some of the raw sources I've worked with in the past.

These include...

8/...pristine and easily read English language documents, such as this letter from the President of Lithuania to the Secretary General of NATO...

9/...and hand written documents in foreign languages, such as this page of notes from the meeting where Jean Monnet articulated the idea for a ECSC

10/We then spend the second half of the course considering debates surrounding key historical events.

By "debates", I mean actual debates -- you know, scholars arguing back-and-forth about their sources and claims!

These debates include...

11/
- The "Fischer Thesis" regarding the onset of World War I
- The motivations driving the US to enter World War II
- The factors motivating the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community
- Whether the US promised the Soviets to not expand NATO.

12/Several of these debates became forums and correspondences in @Journal_IS & @SecStudies_Jrnl

13/By the time the course is over, the students should hopefully have a good sense of what it means when people discuss "identifying" a "cause".

Personally, I find these terms more intuitive when applied to historical debates, not RDD/instrumental variables/matching/etc.

14/Don't get me wrong, I love a good application of propensity score matching 😉

But it was actually the following book that gave me a intuitive sense of what I was doing when applying matching (or other "causal inference" methods)

amazon.com/What-If-Foremo…

15/So that's the course. Should be a lot of fun for both PhD students in @UChicagoPoliSci & MA students in @UChicagoCIR!